Mitzvah Without Miracles
Roland B. Gittelsohn
What can mitzvah mean
to a modern Jew who is a religious naturalist? Perhaps a prior question should
be: what is a religious naturalist? Briefly, he or she is a person who believes
in God, but asserts that God inheres within nature and operates through natural
law. A religious naturalist perceives God to be the Spiritual Energy, Essence,
Core, or Thrust of the universe, not a discrete Supernatural Being.
What, then, can mitzvah
mean to such an individual? Certainly more than custom or folkway, more
than social covenant or mores. Mitzvah, by
very definition, must be cosmically grounded; it must possess empyreal
significance. For the religious naturalist, as for all believing, practicing
Jews, in order to have mitzvah –that
which has been commanded—there must be a metzaveh,
a commander. That commander, moreover, needs to be more than human
ingenuity or convenience.
In the mainstream of Jewish tradition through the centuries,
this posed no great problem. The metzaveh
was God. A mitzvah was God’s
will. It had to be performed because God wanted it. It may have made sense to
the human mind or not; these things were not important. It had to be done,
plainly and simply because God had commanded it.
But how can an Energy or Essence, a Core or a Thrust,
command? For the religious naturalist, who is the metzaveh? Answer: reality itself. Or, more precisely, the physical
and spiritual laws which govern reality. Mitzvot
must be observed because only by recognizing and conforming to the nature
of their environment can human beings increase the probability of their
survival in any meaningful way. Mitzvot are
not man-made; they inhere within the universe. Our Jewish mystics suspected
this long ago. Mordecai Kaplan has summarized the view of the Zohar as holding that “mitzvot are part of the very process
whereby the world came into being.”
I agree with David Polish…that mitzvot are binding upon us “because something happened between God
and Israel, and that some something continues to happen in every land and age.”
What makes me a religious naturalist is interpreting the “something” to be a
historic encounter between the Jewish People and the highest Spiritual Reality
human beings have ever known or felt. No other people has been so persistent as
ours in seeking that Reality and its moral imperatives.
It is easy to illustrate the cosmic nature of mitzvot on the level of physical
reality. The universe is so constructed that, if I wish to survive, I must have
adequate oxygen, nourishment, and exercise. God “wants” me to breath fresh air,
ingest healthful foods, and regularly move my muscles. These, therefore, are mitzvot.
No less is true in the realm of ethical mitzvot. Honesty is a compelling mitzvah. Human nature (which is, after all, nature at its highest
level of development) is such that in the long run the individual or the social
group that consistently flaunts the dictates of honesty risks disaster. The
struggle for freedom is a compelling mitzvah.
Only the person who is capable of giving and receiving love will ever be
fulfilled. These things are true, not because we want them to be and not
because they were decreed by a human legislature, but because they are
ineluctable aspects of reality. Hence the recognition, acceptance, and
observance of them constitute mitzvot.
Most of the mitzvot spelled
out in this guide [Gates of Mitzvah],
however, deal with ritual observance rather than physical law or ethics. Are
they, too, related to cosmic reality? In a less obvious but equally bidning
sense than the physical or moral imperatives suggested above, yes. Human nature
is such that we need to express our emotions and ideals with our whole bodies,
not just our tongues. We need also to be visually and kinetically reminded of
our noblest values and stimulated to pursue them. As otherwise lonely and frightened
individuals, we need common practices and observances which bind us into
meaningful and supportive groups. All of which adds up to the fact that we need
ritual as something more than social luxury or convenience. For us as Reform
Jews, a particular ritual may not be mitzvah. But the need for a pattern of
such rituals, this—because it grows out of and satisfies our very basic nature
as human beings—is mitzvah. And this
we desperately need.
A concrete example at this point may be more instructive than
further paragraphs of theoretical exposition.
The most elaborate—and perhaps the most valuable—mitzvah in our tradition is the seder
ceremony. A supernaturalistically oriented Jew celebrates at his seder God’s miraculous intervention in
nature and history.
The seder means no
less, however, to the religiously naturalistic Jew, who rejects miracles.
Plugging into centuries of his people’s tradition as well as its unique pursuit
of freedom, he visually, audibly, and dramatically commemorates that pursuit and
rededicates himself to it. His metzaveh is
triune: his very special human need to be free, both as a person and a Jew; his
equally human need to augment speech with memory and motion in reinforcement of
his highest values; and his specifically Jewish need to identify with his
people’s destiny.
Permeating our theological differences is the common
understanding that God, however divergently we interpret Him, is the Core
Spiritual Essence of Reality. In this sense, God is the metzaveh of the religiously naturalistic Jew, who eschews the
supernatural not only in theological speculation but also in his approach to mitzvot. He responds naturalistically to
his own essence and to that of his universal setting. Mitzvot for him represent the difference between talking or
philosophizing about Judaism and living it.
They bind him firmly, visibly, to his people and his tradition. They speak to
him imperatively because he is Jewish and wants to remain so.
Plaut,
Gunther, editor; Gates of Mitzvah (New York: CCAR Press, 1979) 108-110
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